


Maid of Honor Jitters

by mosylu



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: F/M, Stress Baking, cut yourself some slack Caitlin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 12:32:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12841260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: The night before Barry and Iris's wedding, Caitlin is freaking out that she's going to somehow ruin everything, even though it's the last thing she wants in the world. She's going to need a lot of baking and a little straight talk from Cisco.





	Maid of Honor Jitters

**Author's Note:**

> written for the Tumblr prompt "Why haven't you been answering your phone?" I’ve been missing my Killervibe friendship on the show, so I’m going to pretend that this happens in canon. The bit about Cynthia is because she’s listed on the episode page for the crossover, but it also says “rumored” so I’m covering my bases.

Her doorbell rang twice in a row and then the key scraped in the lock. She ran over and yanked it open. “Cisco! What if I hadn’t been home?”

“Your car was in its space,” he pointed out.

“Still.”

Cisco, unabashed, pulled his key out of her lock and stuck it back in his pocket. “Why haven’t you been answering your phone?” he asked, then sniffed the air as he shut the door behind him. “Oh shit, and you’re baking too? What kind of spinning is your brain doing?”

“My phone is charging in the other room and I didn’t hear it,” she said, turning her back on him and going back into the kitchen. “And I just thought it would be nice to have some treats for tomorrow.”

“And the next seventeen years,” he said, following her and studying the stacks of plastic containers filled with cookies, pastries, and muffins.

“Maybe I went a little overboard.”

“Ooo, cinnamon rolls?” He licked his lips over the pan cooling on the table, the rolls gleaming with sticky icing.

“Oh, those have raisins.”

He gave her a horrified look. “Why do you hate joy?”

“Not everyone feels the same way you do about raisins.”

“Not everyone is right, either.”

“The batch without raisins is coming out in - ” She checked the timer. “Two minutes. You can put the icing on if you want.”

“That’s a dangerous offer. I accept.” He opened a container and took out a chocolate chip cookie. Normally she’d fuss at him, but he’d seen her in this mode before. She wouldn’t notice if he ate the entire batch. He bit in and let out an mmmm of appreciation. Like a lot of people who weren’t very good cooks (even after two years of classes), Caitlin was an excellent baker

“You’re stress-baking,” he said, sitting backwards on one of her kitchen chairs and taking another healthy bite. “Why?”

“Big day tomorrow,” she said, focusing on rolling out her dough to perfect evenness. “Lots going on. Lots of people are going to be here.”

“You know everything’s all set up, right? We’ve been machines the past few days. You and Iris were at the church decorating for six hours today. I don’t even decorate for Christmas for six hours. Every last little thing is primed and ready to go.”

The buzzer went off and she opened the oven to pull out the pan of raisin-less cinnamon rolls and set it on the cooling rack in front of Cisco. He breathed it in. Damn, those smelled good. “Icing?”

“Covered bowl, over there by the box of muffin cups,” she said, and he retrieved it.

He generously iced two rolls, giving her time to crack, but she turned it around on him. “Why were you calling me? What’s wrong?” She was cutting out little snowmen, tongue sticking out as she worked out how to arrange them so as to optimize her dough area.

“Why does anything have to be wrong for me to call one of my best friends?”

“For you to call me once? Nothing. For you to call me five times in a row? Something’s going on.” She peeled up the excess dough, wadded it into a tiny ball, and started transferring her snowmen onto a parchment-papered baking sheet.

“I thought you didn’t hear your phone.”

“Not the first four times. But I saw the last one and then the text that said you were coming over, so I figured I’d wait until you got here. So?”

He slathered icing on another roll, watching it melt over the hot pastry and ooze down into the cracks between rolls.  

“Well?” She set her spatula down and put the first sheet of cookies in the oven.

“I just haven’t heard anything from Cynthia yet.”

“Ohhhh,” Caitlin said, drawing the syllable out in sympathy.

His girlfriend was on a job. She’d sworn she was going to try and finish up in time to make it to the wedding and be Cisco’s plus one. But - interdimensional radio silence. “Yeah,” he said. “So I’m a little down. Figured I’d see if you wanted to help me eat my feelings.” He waved at the bounty of sweets. “As usual, you were one step ahead of me.” He shot her a grin.

“She’ll make it,” Caitlin said, unwrapping another giant ball of cookie dough and picking up her rolling pin again. “I know she will.”

He gobbed icing onto another roll. “You horning in on my vibing game?”

“No,” she said. “It’s just, why would she ever pass up the chance to see you in formal wear?”

He pointed at her. “That’s what I said!” He stuck the spatula back in the icing and gave it a good stir. “And anyway, even if she doesn’t, there’ll be other parties.”

“Yeah,” Caitlin said. “Of course there will. But she’ll be there tomorrow. She will. And you’ll get to dance and kiss and spend time together and it’ll be lovely.”

He smiled at her and kept icing cinnamon rolls. “All right. I spilled. Your turn. What are you really freaking out about?”

“I’m not freaking out.” Dough rolled out to a precise one-quarter of an inch, she set her rolling pin aside and scowled over her choice of cookie cutters like she was plotting the invasion of Freedonia.

“Forty-five hundred thousand calories in this kitchen prove you wrong.”

She picked out a snowflake and started pressing it into the dough.

“Hmmm?”

“It’s stupid.”

“Go on. Tell Uncle Cisco. You’ll feel better. You know you will.”

“It’s just that if something happens tomorrow, I’ll never forgive myself.”

He opened his mouth to automatically refute that, then paused. “Are you, uh, are you feeling a little frosty lately?”

“No,” she said. “It’s gotten a lot better.”

He made a mental note to recharge and pack the power suppressor bracelets anyway. Killer Frost didn’t seem have anything specific against Iris or Barry without Savitar screwing up her head, but it would make Caitlin feel better. “Have there been any rumblings from her Crazyship?”

“I haven’t heard anything of Amunet Black since the night of the bachelorette party.”

“Okay.”

“I know that everything is all set up and ready to go. But I can’t seem to turn off the little voice in my brain that keeps reminding me that everything I’ve touched for the past four years has turned to garbage. And then Iris asked me to be her Maid of Honor, and I don’t know why. And that little voice keeps saying I’m going to ruin this, too.”

He took that in. “Do you want logic or sympathy right now?”

She stamped out three more snowflakes, bam bam bam, very carefully. “Logic, please.”

“Okay. That’s an incredibly arrogant thing to say.”

She whipped around, her mouth falling open. “Arrogant?”

“Yeah! Arrogant. We just got finished talking about how everything is planned to the last detail. There are backups of backups. And you think you can ruin it all by yourself? No. Just - no. And while we’re on the subject, none of - ” He hesitated. “Most of what’s gone to shit in the past four years has had nothing to do with you. It was Thawne’s fault, and Zoom’s, and Savitar’s - ”

“Killer Frost was my fault,” she said. “I should have done more to get her under control myself instead of trying to pretend she didn’t exist.”

“You’re working on that now,” he said. “I’ve seen you. I don’t know what you think will happen, but it’s gonna have to be a whole lot bigger than you to ruin this day.”

“I can’t let Iris down,” she said in a trembling voice. “She believes in me. I don’t know why, but she does.”

“Look, I don’t know why she asked you, either, but I know it wasn’t to test your worth as a person. You’ve done everything you can to be there for us, to be honest and make up for the things that Killer Frost did and to work on yourself. This isn’t some kind of final exam. You don’t have to measure up to some impossible standard. We’re your friends, not your mom.”

She was still for a moment, and then reached up to wipe her face, leaving a smudge of flour behind. “Is sympathy still on offer?” she said in a small voice.

“Of course. C'mere.”

She rushed into his arms, bumping him into the table for a split second, but he held her close and they steadied. She snuffled into his hair once or twice and sighed. He could feel the tension seeping out of her body.

He patted her back. “Look, tomorrow’s gonna be great. They’re going to have an amazing wedding, everyone will look like a million dollars, it’ll be an excellent party, and I’ll definitely get footage of you doing the Chicken Dance. It’s going to be a wonderful day, and nothing’s going to go wrong.”

She pulled away to look at him. “Say that to someone who hasn’t been around for the past four years.”

He screwed up his mouth. “Okay. Fair. Um. If something goes wrong - which will have nothing to do with you, by the way - we’ll handle it. That’s what we do. We’re gonna have more metas per capita in that church than Iron Heights. Something goes down, I’ll boom it to shit, you’ll freeze it solid, Oliver will stick it full of arrows, Kara will, I don’t know, pull out one of her million alien tricks. We’ll handle it,” he said again. “And you’ll be part of handling it. Got that?”

She looked doubtful, but when she met his eyes, she lifted her chin. “Got it.” She wiped her eyes again. “I think I got flour on your shirt.”

“That’s okay, I got icing on yours.”

“I’ve been baking for the past three hours. It’s not the first stain on this shirt.”

“Three hours? Straight?”

“Mhm.” She looked around as if suddenly realizing just how crazy she’d gone. “Oh my goodness. I made a lot, didn’t I?”

He checked his phone when it buzzed and held it up. “Wally wants to hit Big Belly Burger. Want me to tell him to come over and pick up some yums?”

“I think you’d better,” she said.

He started texting back. “Great. He can take those damn cinnamon rolls with the raisins. Seriously. Nasty.”

FINIS


End file.
